What is ethics?

Some years ago, sociologist Raymond Baumhart asked business people, "What does ethics mean
to you?" Among their replies were the following:
"Ethics

has

to

"Ethics

has

"Being

ethical

"Ethics

consists

do

with

what

to

do

is
of

my

the

doing
standards

feelings

tell

with

my

what
of

me

is

right

religious
the

behavior

our

or

wrong."
beliefs."

law

requires."

society

accepts."

"I don't know what the word means."

These replies might be typical of our own. The meaning of "ethics" is hard to pin down, and the
views many people have about ethics are shaky.
Like Baumhart's first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings. But being
ethical is clearly not a matter of following one's feelings. A person following his or her feelings may
recoil from doing what is right. In fact, feelings frequently deviate from what is ethical.
Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most religions, of course, advocate high ethical
standards. Yet if ethics were confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to religious people.
But ethics applies as much to the behavior of the atheist as to that of the devout religious person.
Religion can set high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for ethical behavior.
Ethics, however, cannot be confined to religion nor is it the same as religion.
Being ethical is also not the same as following the law. The law often incorporates ethical
standards to which most citizens subscribe. But laws, like feelings, can deviate from what is
ethical. Our own pre-Civil War slavery laws and the old apartheid laws of present-day South Africa
are grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from what is ethical.
Finally, being ethical is not the same as doing "whatever society accepts." In any society, most
people accept standards that are, in fact, ethical. But standards of behavior in society can deviate
from what is ethical. An entire society can become ethically corrupt. Nazi Germany is a good
example of a morally corrupt society.
Moreover, if being ethical were doing "whatever society accepts," then to find out what is ethical,
one would have to find out what society accepts. To decide what I should think about abortion, for
example, I would have to take a survey of American society and then conform my beliefs to
whatever society accepts. But no one ever tries to decide an ethical issue by doing a survey.
Further, the lack of social consensus on many issues makes it impossible to equate ethics with
whatever society accepts. Some people accept abortion but many others do not. If being ethical

were doing whatever society accepts, one would have to find an agreement on issues which does
not, in fact, exist.
What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right
and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits
to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose
the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud.
Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And,
ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right to freedom
from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because
they are supported by consistent and well-founded reasons.
Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards. As mentioned
above, feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to
constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics
also means, then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct,
and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that a re
reasonable and solidly-base
A human act is an action that is considered to be carried out voluntarily, whereas an act of man is an
involuntary action. The distinctions and nuances between an act of man and a human act are often a focus
of philosophical debate.
In essence it is agreed that a human act is an act on which an individual can make a conscious decision
whether or not to carry out that act. An act of man is the natural act of vegetative and sense faculties such
as digestion, the beating of the heart, growing, bodily reactions and visual or auditory perceptions. The
debate takes place around the fringes of these definitions. Acts of man, for example, can be considered
human acts if the action is carried out with malice.